FOR A
DISCIPLE of Suzuki-roshi, this book will be Suzuki-roshi’s
mind—not his ordinary mind or personal mind, but his Zen
mind, the mind of his teacher Gyokujun So-on-daiosho,
the mind of Dogen-zenji, the mind of the entire
succession—broken or unbroken, historical and
mythical—of teachers, patriarchs, monks, and laymen from
Buddha’s time until today, and it will be the mind of
Buddha himself, the mind of Zen practice. But, for most
readers, the book will be an example of how a Zen master
talks and teaches. It will be a book of instruction
about how to practice Zen, about Zen life, and about the
attitudes and understanding that make Zen practice
possible. For any reader, the book will be an
encouragement to realize his own nature, his own Zen
mind.

Zen mind is
one of those enigmatic phrases used by Zen teachers to
make you notice yourself, to go beyond the words and
wonder what your own mind and being are. This is the
purpose of all Zen teaching—to make you wonder and to
answer that wondering with the deepest expression of
your own nature. The calligraphy on the front of the
binding [fully visible in the original editions -
see this] reads nyorai in Japanese or tathagata in
Sanskrit. This is a name for Buddha which means “he who
has followed the path, who has returned from suchness,
or is suchness, thus-ness, is-ness, emptiness, the fully
completed one.” It is the ground principle which makes
the appearance of a Buddha possible. It is Zen mind. At
the time Suzuki-roshi wrote this calligraphy—using for a
brush the frayed end of one of the large swordlike
leaves of the yucca plants that grow in the mountains
around Zen Mountain Center—he said: “This means that
Tathagata is the body of the whole earth.”

The practice
of Zen mind is beginner’s mind. The innocence of the
first inquiry—what am I?—is needed throughout Zen
practice. The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the
habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and
open to all the possibilities. It is the kind of mind
which can see things as they are, which step by step and
in a flash can realize the original nature of
everything. This practice of Zen mind is found
throughout the book. Directly or by inference, every
section of the book concerns the question of how to
maintain beginner’s mind through your meditation and in
your life. This is an ancient way of teaching, using the
simplest language and the situations of everyday life.
This means the student should teach himself.

Beginner’s
mind was a favorite expression of Dogen-zenji’s. The
calligraphy of the frontispiece, also by Suzuki-roshi,
reads shoshin, or beginner’s mind. The Zen way of
calligraphy is to write in the most straightforward,
simple way as if you were a beginner, not trying to make
something skillful or beautiful, but simply writing with
full attention as if you were discovering what you were
writing for the first time; then your full nature will
be in your writing. This is the way of practice moment
after moment.

This book was
conceived and initiated by Marian Derby, a close
disciple of Suzuki-roshi and organizer of the Los Altos
Zen group. Suzuki-roshi joined the zazen meditations of
this group once or twice a week, and after each
meditation period he would talk to them, encouraging
their practice and helping them with their problems.
Marian taped his talks and soon saw that as the group
developed the talks acquired a continuity and
development which would work well as a book and could be
a much-needed record of Suzuki-roshi’s remarkable spirit
and teaching. From her transcriptions of talks made over
a period of several years, she put together the first
draft of the present book.

Then Trudy
Dixon, another close disciple of Suzuki-roshi who had
much experience editing Zen Center’s publication, Wind
Bell, edited and organized the manuscript for
publication. It is no easy task to edit this kind of
book, and explaining why will help the reader understand
the book better. Suzuki-roshi takes the most difficult
but persuasive way to talk about Buddhism—in terms of
the ordinary circumstances of people’s lives—to try to
convey the whole of the teaching in statements as simple
as “Have a cup of tea.” The editor must be aware of the
implications behind such statements in order not to edit
out for the sake of clarity or grammar the real meaning
of the lectures. Also, without knowing Suzuki-roshi well
and having experience working with him, it is easy to
edit out for the same reasons the background
understanding that is his personality or energy or will.
And it is also easy to edit out the deeper mind of the
reader which needs the repetition, the seemingly obscure
logic, and the poetry in order to know itself. Passages
which seem obscure or obvious are often illuminating
when they are read very carefully, wondering why this
man would say such a thing.

The editing
is further complicated by the fact that English is
thoroughly dualistic in its basic assumptions and has
not had the opportunity over centuries to develop a way
of expressing nondualistic Buddhist ideas, as has
Japanese. Suzuki-roshi uses these different cultural
vocabularies freely, expressing himself in both Japanese
and Western ways of thinking. In his lectures, they
merge poetically and philosophically. But in
transcriptions, the pauses, rhythm, and emphasis that
give his words their deeper meaning and hold his
thoughts together are apt to be lost. So Trudy worked
many months by herself and with Suzuki-roshi to retain
his original words and flavor, and yet produce a
manuscript that is in understandable English.

Trudy divided
the book according to emphasis into three sections—Right
Practice, Right Attitude, and Right
Understanding—roughly corresponding to body, feeling,
and mind. She also chose the titles for the talks and
the epigraphs that follow

the titles,
these being taken usually from the body of the lectures.
The choices are of course somewhat arbitrary, but she
did this to set up a kind of tension between the
specific sections, titles, and epigraphs, and the talks
themselves. The relationship between the talks and these
added elements will help the reader probe the lectures.
The only talk not given originally to the Los Altos
group is the Epilogue, which is a condensation of two
talks given when Zen Center moved into its new San
Francisco headquarters.

Shortly after
finishing work on this book, Trudy died of cancer at the
age of thirty. She is survived by her two children,
Annie and Will, and her husband, Mike, a painter. He
contributed the drawing of the fly in the part two
chapter titled “God Giving.” A Zen student for many
years, when asked to do something for this book, he
said: “I can’t do a Zen drawing. I can’t do a drawing
for anything other than the drawing. I certainly can’t
see doing drawings of zafu [meditation pillows] or
lotuses or ersatz something. I can see this idea,
though.” A realistic fly often occurs in Mike’s
paintings. Suzuki-roshi is very fond of the frog, which
sits so still it might be asleep, but is alert enough to
notice every insect that comes by. Maybe the fly is
waiting for the frog.

Trudy and I
worked together throughout the development of Zen Mind,
Beginner’s Mind, and she asked me to complete the
editing and see the book through to publication. After
considering several publishers, I found that John
Weatherhill, Inc., through Meredith Weatherby and Audie
Bock, were able to polish, design, and publish this book
in exactly the way it should be published. The
manuscript was read before publication by Professor
Kogen Mizuno, head of the Buddhist Studies Department,
Komazawa University, and an outstanding scholar of
Indian Buddhism. He generously helped with the
transliteration of the Sanskrit and Japanese Buddhist
terms.

Except for
now and again in lectures, Suzuki-roshi seldom talks
about his past, but this much I have pieced together. He
was the disciple of Gyokujun So-on-roshi. He had other
teachers; the most influential for him was Kishizawa
Ian-roshi, a leading authority and lecturer on Dogen.
Kishizawa-roshi emphasized a deep and careful
understanding of Dogen, the koans—particularly the Blue
Cliff Records—and the sutras. Suzuki Roshi was twelve
when he began his apprenticeship under his father’s
disciple, Gyokujun. After years living with his teacher,
he continued his practice and study at a Buddhist
university, Komazawa, and at the main Soto training
monasteries, Eiheiji and Sojiji. He also studied with a
Rinzai teacher for awhile.

Gyokujun-roshi died when Suzuki was thirty. As a result,
he had the responsibility, at a rather young age, of
both his father’s temple (who had died shortly before
Gyokujun) and his teacher’s temple. The latter, Rinsoin,
was a small monastery and head temple for about two
hundred other temples. One of his main tasks was the
rebuilding of Rinsoin in the exacting tradition his
teacher and he wanted.

Exceptional
for Japan during the nineteen thirties and forties, he
led discussion groups at Rinsoin that questioned the
militaristic assumptions and actions of the times.
Before the war, and from the time he was young, he had
been interested in coming to America; however, at the
insistence of his teacher, he had given up the idea. But
in 1956 and twice again in ’58, a friend, who was one of
the leaders of the Soto School, persisted in asking him
to go to San Francisco to lead the Japanese Soto
congregation there. On the third request, Suzuki-roshi
accepted.

In 1959, when
he was fifty-five, he came to America. After postponing
his return several times, he decided to stay in America.
He stayed because he found that Americans have a
beginner’s mind, that they have few preconceptions about
Zen, are quite open to it, and confidently believe that
it can help their lives. He found they question Zen in a
way that gives Zen life. Shortly after his arrival
several people stopped by and asked if they could study
Zen with him. He said he did zazen early every morning
and they could join him if they liked. Since then a
rather large Zen group has grown up around him—now in
six locations in California. At present he spends most
of his time at Zen Center, 300 Page Street, San
Francisco, where about sixty students live and many more
do zazen regularly, and at Zen Mountain Center at
Tassajara Springs above Carmel Valley. This latter is
the first Zen monastery in America, and there another
sixty or so students live and practice for three-month
or longer periods.

Trudy felt
that understanding how Zen students feel about their
teacher might, more than anything else, help the reader
to understand these talks. What the teacher really
offers the student is literally living proof that all
this talk and the seemingly impossible goals can be
realized in this lifetime. The deeper you go in your
practice, the deeper you find your teacher’s mind is,
until you finally see that your mind and his mind are
Buddha’s mind. And you find that zazen meditation is the
most perfect expression of your actual nature. The
following tribute from Trudy to her teacher describes
very well the relationship between Zen teacher and Zen
student:

“A roshi is a person who has
actualized that perfect freedom which is the
potentiality for all human beings. He exists freely in
the fullness of his whole being. The flow of his
consciousness is not the fixed repetitive patterns of
our usual self-centered consciousness, but rather arises
spontaneously and naturally from the actual
circumstances of the present. The results of this in
terms of the quality of his life are
extraordinary—buoyancy, vigor, straightforwardness,
simplicity, humility, serenity, joyousness, uncanny
perspicacity, and unfathomable compassion. His whole
being testifies to what it means to live in the reality
of the present. Without anything said or done, just the
impact of meeting a personality so developed can be
enough to change another’s whole way of life. But in the
end it is not the extraordinariness of the teacher which
perplexes, intrigues, and deepens the student, it is the
teacher’s utter ordinariness. Because he is just
himself, he is a mirror for his students. When we are
with him we feel our own strengths and shortcomings
without any sense of praise or criticism from him. In
his presence we see our original face, and the
extraordinariness we see is only our own true nature.
When we learn to let our own nature free, the boundaries
between master and student disappear in a deep flow of
being and joy in the unfolding of Buddha mind.”